


when it starts to ring

by orphan_account



Series: Timer AU [2]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmate-Identifying Timers, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-15
Updated: 2014-08-15
Packaged: 2018-02-13 05:08:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2138136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a few missing scenes from "apples grow too," from liam's perspective. the title is from this poem: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/27126. it is a very good poem and you should definitely read it.</p><p>warning for some non-explicit internalized homophobia, as well as a brief scene including violence.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when it starts to ring

Liam doesn’t have a party for his seventeenth. It wouldn’t be much of a do anyway, since he doesn’t actually get his timer on the day of his seventeenth birthday—his dad takes him to one of the kiosks downtown the next day on his lunch break and tells him to hurry up about it. Liam doesn’t mind; he’s grateful that he’s getting one in the first place. He knows they’re expensive.

“All right, come on then,” his dad says when he makes it out of the kiosk. His ears are red, so Liam knows he’s at least a little pleased.

In the car on the way, Liam holds his wrist between his knees and stares at it, wide-eyed. Six days.

Six _days._

It’s so soon. He doesn’t know if he’s ready, honestly.

\----------

It takes Liam an entire forty-eight hours to realize that it might be somebody he knows. It’ll be a Tuesday when it happens, which is a school day. And most of the people he sees on any given school day are the people in school.

Liam glances around his maths class, trying not to make his perverted soulmate fantasies visible on his face.

It could be Allison Herschel. Liam had almost kissed Allison Herschel once, at a school dance. Or actually one of Allison Herschel’s friends had come to tell Louis that Allison Herschel thought Liam was cute, and would he want to kiss her, and then Liam, who had been standing _right there,_ ran to the loo out of fright and then pretended his sister had come to pick him up early.

But he’d walked home triumphant, thinking of Allison Herschel’s long brown hair and how impossible it had seemed that she liked him.

Only she hadn’t spoken to him since that school dance, and it seemed unlikely that she had been nursing a secret longing for the two years since. Now she was dating the Other Liam, Liam Novak, who had moved here when Liam was fifteen and had since become by far the preferred Liam in Liam’s class.

Liam tries to think of what Louis would say, if Liam told him he had a timer, which he isn’t going to, at least not until he knows for sure that it isn’t going to be—embarrassing. Louis would probably cackle and suggest that Liam’s soulmate is Ms. Lachowsky and spend the rest of the period coming up with the title for their tell-all feature in the _Mirror._

\----------

On Monday night it suddenly occurs to Liam that he could be about to have sex.

He spends the rest of the night with his laptop under the covers, feverishly researching. He barely hears his timer go off when the clock ticks over to midnight.

\----------

Tuesday morning Liam gets dressed very carefully. He’s laid out his plaid button-down and his best jeans on the bed, and he brushes his hair out with his mum’s boar-bristle brush, which she says is better for your hair and doesn’t yank. When he’s finished it stands out around his head in a kind of curly halo, and he frowns into the mirror, licks his hand and tries to tamp it down.

He thought hard about buying new trainers, because his old ones are rather scuffed, but in the end he didn’t want to have to ask his parents for the money and risk a lot of embarrassing questions, and anyway he was saving up. He didn’t know for what, exactly, yet; only that it was important.

Liam spends the entire day in a state of low-level panic. At first he tries not to make eye contact with anyone at all, but then he realizes that at that rate he’s going to zero out by accident with Edna who works at his dad’s store, and after that he tries to meet everybody’s eyes as they pass him in the hallway. It’s an odd feeling, looking up so much. He didn’t know that everybody looked so stressed out all the time.

By the end of the day, Liam is absolutely exhausted. He shrugs off Louis’s pestering to sit in on rehearsals and go to Louis’s after, and heads out defeated. Around the back of the school parking lot there’s a knot of boys from the year below Liam, and he makes his newly habitual eye contact with one of them before he remembers not to.

“What’s your name?” the one he’d looked at says suddenly, as Liam tries to pass.

Liam shoulders past but the kid jogs back, his friends trailing after. “You trying something?” the kid demands.

Liam knows he’s only posturing for his friends, he’s only a stupid sixteen-year-old, but he can’t help himself. He spits, “Get out of my face.”

The kid’s friends laugh and pull a little closer. Liam’s face heats up. He’s not going to get into a confrontation with a bunch of children from the year below.

He tries, again, to leave, but one of them yanks on the back of his shirt and Liam swings around, pushes the one who did it. Then the kid from before jumps on him and they fall to the concrete, tussling just long enough for the kid to get a shot in before Liam manages to shove him off and take off at a run for the school doors, their shouts fading behind him.

Liam bends over and rests his hands on his knees for a moment once he’s in the covered walkway. There’s blood in his mouth. He licks at it and pulls his shirt away from his chest, glancing down; there’s blood on that too, which means he’ll have to either explain it to his mum or throw away his favorite shirt.

“Are you all right, mate?”

Liam flinches and looks up. He has just enough time to take in the fact that there’s a boy leaning against the doors before he hears the chime.

Liam doesn’t know what his face does. It feels as though he’s been punched, but in a worse way this time.

Liam knows who the boy is. He’s Zayn Malik. And Liam has never thought about Zayn Malik, not ever. He’s seen him in the hallways a few times. He had Biology with him last year. He never, not ever—not once.

Liam feels as if he’s been skinned alive.

“You can’t—” Liam gasps, trying to get to his feet. His voice breaks in humiliation.

Zayn blinks. “Liam, mate. Are you—is everything OK?”

“You know—my name?” Liam says without meaning to. His knuckles are white on the wall behind him.

Zayn nods, and his eyes drift down a little. He looks angry, maybe. Liam can’t tell.

“I’m so—I’m so sorry,” Liam says after a minute. Blurts it out, really. Zayn looks up again, his eyebrows drawing together. “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” Liam asks. He sounds like a kid to his own ears.

There’s a long silence, and then Zayn nods, his face smoothing out a little. “Yeah,” he says quietly.

“Swear?” Liam says, desperately.

“I swear,” Zayn says, looking back at Liam steadily. He holds his hand out and Liam stares down at it, unsure what to do with it. At last he grasps it quickly, gives it a firm shake. A feeling like electricity passes through him when he touches Zayn’s hand, and he quickly jerks his own back, stuffing it in his pocket.

“Okay,” Liam says, nodding. “Okay, so, I’ll. I’ll see you around?”

“Or not, I s’pose,” Zayn offers, raising his eyebrows. Liam’s face flames again. He nods jerkily and then he’s moving as fast as he can toward the parking lot, twisting his neck around to see if the knot of boys are still there, but there’s nobody around, and when he glances back, Zayn is still there, staring after him.

\-------------

Liam passes the next week feeling as if there’s a sign painted on his forehead. He sees Zayn everywhere, in the hallways, on the street, in passing cars—but it’s never him when Liam looks a second time. It doesn’t stop him from jumping, every time. Even stranger is that nobody notices—his parents are having a long cold war sort of row and deaf to anything happening outside of their dull fight, and Louis is so wrapped up in his new friend Harry that he’s barely got time to say hello to Liam in the mornings. Niall doesn’t appear to notice anything amiss, but Niall never does.

Part of Liam feels like they should notice, they should see the new blinking lights above his head that spell out _THIS ONE’S GOING TO TURN OUT HOMOSEXUAL,_ but more of him is glad they haven’t. It makes the whole thing feel like a dream, like maybe it didn’t really happen.

So when Zayn appears in the doorway at Louis’s party Liam reacts exactly as if he’s seen a ghost, because he sort of has.

Zayn looks rather as if he’s seen one too. “I’m sorry, mate,” Liam hears him say. “I didn’t know—I’ll go. I’m sorry.”

“Do you know each other?” Louis asks, looking between them.

“No,” Zayn says, and then he’s gone.

Liam glances at the shards of the mug he’s dropped—twice, now—on the floor, and then back up at Louis’s bewildered expression. “I’ll clean them up,” he promises at last, hurrying after Zayn.

He finds Zayn in the street, heading for the bus stop bench at the end of the road. “Zayn!” Liam calls. “Zayn … wait.”

Zayn doesn’t stop walking, but he slows enough for Liam to catch up to him, panting. “Didn’t mean to crash your party, mate,” he says. “Honest mistake. I’m just gonna, you know.” He shrugs in the direction of the bus stop.

“No, don’t—don’t go,” Liam says, catching Zayn’s elbow. Zayn shakes him off and Liam drops his hand like he’s been burned. He stops for half a second and then hurries to catch up again.

“It’s just Louis’s birthday. It’s not a big deal if you’re there,” he tells Zayn.

Zayn turns on him, and the full force of his attention makes Liam feel peeled open, all his insides on the outside. “I thought you didn’t want me around,” he says. “In case they find out.”

“I don’t…” Liam looks down. “I’m scared,” he says at last.

Zayn’s expression softens a little. “Yeah.”

“It’s not so much them, though.” Liam swallows. “It’s more … my dad.”

“I haven’t told anybody,” Zayn says. “Swear.”

“I didn’t even imagine it, though,” Liam blurts out. “Like, I never thought about myself like—that. It just—I didn’t expect it. In my mind.”

“Were you upset, then?” Zayn asks, glancing quickly away. “When you found out it was me?”

Liam tries to think hard about what to say. “Not upset,” he says at last. “Just scared.” His mouth is dry. “Not because of you, though. I mean, you’re, you know.”

“I’m what.” Zayn raises his eyebrows.

“You know,” Liam says helplessly. “Like, you’re Zayn Malik and that. You’re like, amazing. I dunno how I’m meant to end up with you, honestly,” he adds. “I’m pretty much useless at everything.”

“That’s not true,” Zayn says. He’s smiling, just a little bit, which Liam has never seen him do before. “You’re brilliant at boxing.”

“How did you know I did boxing?” Liam demands, taken aback.

Zayn grins at him for real this time, his tongue pressing up against his teeth. “I go too, sometimes. I saw you once. A couple times.”

“Why didn’t I see you?”

“I dunno,” Zayn says. “Want to go back inside?”

“Yeah,” Liam says, feeling dazed. “Louis will be wondering where we are.”

Their shoulders brush once as they make their way across the grass.

\--------

“It’s not as if it makes you instantly happy. Look at Zayn and Liam, are they—”

Liam stands up suddenly. He doesn’t mean to. It just happens.

Zayn looks over at him, then at Harry, and snaps, “Shut up, Harry.”

“No!” Harry says. “I didn’t mean it like that. Zayn—Liam—”

“It’s fine, Harry,” Liam says.  “I think I’m going to head home, actually, Ruth’s probably tired of covering for me.”

“I’ll walk you,” Zayn says.

“No,” Liam says. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” He glances around. “Sorry for missing the moment, Louis. Happy birthday again. Bye, Niall.”

He’s halfway down the street when Zayn catches up with him.

“I told you I didn’t want you to follow me,” Liam snaps. He feels drunk and dizzy and sad. Of all the people who shouldn’t see him like this, Zayn is at the top of the list.

Zayn is quiet, beside him, keeping pace. “Harry shouldn’t have said that,” he says at last.

“Why not?” Liam says. He bites his lip, hard.

“You’re unhappy, then,” Zayn says after a moment.

“Are you not?” Liam asks. It’s hot out and he’s starting to sweat through his shirt. “Like you didn’t get your timer and think it was going to be some incredible moment, and change everything, and then you get—me, and I’m—I can’t make that happen.”

Liam can hear Zayn swallow beside him. “I’m not,” he says, and Liam glances over, surprised. Zayn’s looking at the ground, his expression obscured in the gap between streetlights. “I knew it would be you,” he adds. “Or like—I hoped it would be.”

Liam stops walking. “But you never even talked to me,” he says, dumbfounded.

Zayn shrugs.

“And you’re not—because of how I was to you—how things are—” Liam takes a deep breath. “Like, you should have those things, that make it worth it.”

“What things?” Zayn asks.

Liam flushes, a deep red he can feel in his ears. “You know—like someone who can be a real type of—of boyfriend, or girlfriend, and you can hold hands with them, and kiss them, and it’s real.”

“Do you want to hold my hand?” Zayn asks.

Liam shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says.

Zayn reaches out, carefully, and takes hold of Liam’s hand. His hand feels soft for a boy’s hand, and Liam remembers how it had felt to put his lips against it.

He drags his eyes up to Zayn’s face. Some part of Liam had expected that the whole thing was a joke, that Zayn was making fun of him, but Zayn looks serious, his eyes big and dark.

“Do you want to kiss me?” Zayn asks.

Liam can hear his own breaths, loud in the empty street. “I don’t know,” he says. He closes his eyes.

Zayn leans forward, and Liam swears his breath smells sweet. He can feel how close Zayn’s face is to his, and he inhales, trying to steady himself. At that moment, Zayn presses his lips against Liam’s, cutting off his air. Liam can’t think. His lips are warm, almost hot, and Liam can feel the sharpness of his chin, and that smell is all around him, like something he could eat.

He sways forward a little when Zayn pulls away. There’s a ringing in his ears.

When he opens his eyes, Zayn is still in front of him, that same cautious, dark-eyed look on his face.

“Nobody has to see it for it to be real,” Zayn says.

Liam blinks, swallows.

“Okay,” he says.


End file.
